Spider-Spun Tales:
A Bibliography of Spiders in Literature and the Visual Arts

The works included use to
spiders as major symbols and/or characters or in significant cameo appearances.
My awareness of how frequent and important these appearances are in the
literatures of cultures world-wide began as I researched an essay on Spider
Woman. Whether as Grandmother Spider, creator, or as Black Widow, destroyer,
this ancient being has inspired creative artists in all mediums in all the
habitats she has shared with humans. Understanding why that is so lends
insight to the place of humans in the web of nature, a web she is credited with
creating by peoples around the globe.

The spiders, honeybees, yellow jackets, and mud daubers: these insects
still speaka language that is older than humans. The buffalo, elk, wolf,
coyotethey still talk, too. It's we, the people, who have forgotten how
to listen.
--Osage storyteller Archie Mason (www.jillmax.com/Spider.html)

Primary Sources:

Alexie, Sherman.
The Summer of Black Widows
. New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1996.
Acknowledges spiders as the source of stories: In the corners of our old
houses/we still find those small bundles. (Joy Porter and Kenneth M.
Roemer, eds.
The Cambridge Companion of Native American Literature
, p. 157)

Baring-Gould, Sabine. 1887
Red Spider
. Dublin, Ireland: Nonsuch, nd.
According to popular superstition, the red spider has the power to spin money
in the pocket of the person who secures its services. In this 1887 novel by
folklore anthologist Sabine Baring-Gould, Devinshire native Hillary Nanespian
squashes one of the red spiders, which has surprising consequences for his
brother-in-law Taverner Langford, and indeed their entire region.

The frightening metamorphoses of the Other Mother late in this
animated film based on Neil Gaimon 2002 novel of the same
name, suggests the stereotype of the deadly Black Widow still haunts American society.

Emily Dickinson obviously saw something of her own poetic activity
in the movement of the spider, as in the famous poem which starts ['A Spider
sewed at night' .And in other poems, for example, 'The
spider --dancing softly to himself/ His Coil of Pearlunwinds.' She
elsewhere calls the spider an artist of 'surpassing merit' whose tapestries,
wrought in an hour, are 'Continents of Light'; but also very ephemera, 'He
plies from Nought to Nought /In insubstantial Trade'. (Tanner 26).

________. #1373: The Spider as an Artist (1875). In Franklin. 527.

The Spider as an Artist
Has never been employed 
Though his surpassing Merit
Is freely certified
By every Broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian Land 
Neglected Son of Genius
I take thee by the Hand  (257)

Dostoyevski, Fyodor.
Crime and Punishment
. Trans. David Magarshak. New York: Greenwich House, 1982.
Spiders may be our most potent symbol of primeval life, yet they are
associated not with expansive landscapes but with desplate crannies. This
paradox is the basis of a vision by the perverse Svidrigaylov in
Crime and Punishment
(first published in 1865-66). Svidrigaylov picture eternity not as vast but
as 'a little room, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in
every corner ' (305) (Sax 242).

The Navajo legend of how a stubborn girl learns from Spider Woman how to
keep her life in balance by respecting its boundaries; explains why Navajo
blanket weavers include a spirit pathway in their creations to this day (
www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/405
).

Edwards, Jonathan. Of Insects.

Of all Insects no one is more wonderfull than the Spider especially with
Respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.' Edwards was
particularly struck to see spiders apparently 'swimming in the air' , and
he describes how he watched and experimented to see how they managed to sustain
themselves in space. The secret was the way they 'put out a web at their
tails' which was so light that the wind took it, and held up the spider at the
same time' (Tanner 25).

As chthonic figures, spiders are constantly linked with the dead and the
realm beneath the earth .Jonathan Edwards preached that 'the God that
holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome
insect, over a fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked' (57) (Sax
242).
Frost, Robert. 1936. Design.
www./starve.org/teaching/intro-poetry/design2.html

In an era when the religious loyalties of the people seem to be shifting,
Badgertaill, who has a blue spider tattooed on his cheeks, learns
from Old Woman North that Spiderwoman waffles, unsure where her loyalties
lie (25, 40). In the newly renovated kiva Spider Woman now dances
in new plaster on the east wall, dressed in a bright yellow
dress and carrying a feather praying fan (51). Originally,
she led the Hero twins out into this world, casting her web
into the sky ..Then, as the people died, she would pull the souls of the
worthy up with strands of her web. They became Star People (63).
Spider Woman's constellation rises several hands before dawn (300).
She is angry because the First People don't look up to her the way
they used to and, now, 'only the strongest strands of silk tether the
web .Spider Woman wants all of the flies in the web before those
who, like Badgertail, are loyal to her strike and regain her power (310).

Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended
in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its
tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is
imaginative it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it convert the
very pulses of the air into revelations (Tanner 27).

Collaborators Kelly Bennett and Ronia Davidson, inspired by Navajo weaver and
storyteller Sarah Natan, draw together tales from, thereby exploring the
recurrence of the spider as a unifying thread in the literature of diverse
Native American cultures (a href="http://www.jillmax.com/Spider.htm">http://www.jillmax.com/Spider.htm).

Moffett, Thomas. Little Miss Moffett.
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

The spiders have always been slandered
in the idiotic pages
of exasperating simplifiers
who take the fly's point of view,
who describe them as devouring,
carnal, unfaithful, lascivious.
For me, that reputation
discredits just those who concocted it:
the spider is an engineer,
a divine maker of watches,
for one fly more or less
let the imbeciles detest them.
I want to have a talk with the spider,
I want her to weave me a star. (196-7)

Patrick D. Murphy explains that the poem commemorates stones of the walls
near Spider Springs [which are] not cemented together but balanced in a woven
pattern which illustrates a fundamental part of Spider Woman's
wisdom, wisdom that goes beyond the patterns of balance/weaving,
necessitating ongoing renewal or participation by the walls' human
builder (
Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature
[Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000], 106).

Ovid traced the origin of spiders to the story of Arachne, a young girl
so skilled at spinning and weaving that even the nymphs gazed on her with
wonder. She had boasted that her skill exceeded even that of the goddess
Athena. Upon hearing this, the goddess took on the shape of an old woman and
went to Arachne, warning her against arrogance. When Arachne refused to
retract her boast, Athena revealed herself and challenged Arachne to a contest
in weaving. Even then, Arachne was not intimidated .On her loom, Athena
wove pictures of mortals who had dared to measure themselves against the
divinities and met their doom. On her loom, Arachne wove pictures showing the
follies of gods and goddesses, especially in their affairs with mortals.
Athena became so furious that she began to beat Arachne until the young
girl ran away and tried to hang herself. 'Live,' said Athena, 'but hang
forever,' and Arachne was changed into a spider suspended by a thread' (Book 4,
1-145) (Sax 237).

We could scarcely hope to find a better image of the American Romantic
writer, which is almost to say the American writer, than this. Isolated and
secreting filament, filament, filament (think of Whitman's constantly renewed
stream of notations and enumerations) to explore, to relate to, and to fill
'the vacant, vaste surrounding'. America is the 'measureless oceans of space';
the web is the private creation of the writer, constructed with a view of
attaching himself somehow to reality, a world of his own making in which he can
live on his own terms, assimilating and transforming what the outside world
brings his way. (Tanner 26)

Wu Cheng-en.
Journey to the West
.
The Chinese novel Journey to the West tells how the monk Tripitaka
Tang was once captured by soider-woman . He stopped at a mansion to ask
for a vegetarian meal and was greeted by four pleasant young women, but the
meal they offered turned out to be human flesh. When the monk tried to leave,
they tied him with strings spun out of their navels. Only rescue by his animal
companions prevented him from becoming their meal (Sax 240).

Hillyard, Paul.
The Book of the Spider: From Arachnophobia to the Love of the Spider
. London: Hutchinson, 1994.
________. The Private Life of Spiders. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2007.

O'Connor, Patrick.
Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse: Paper Dolls and Spider Women.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

The emblematic figure of spider woman inspires his readings of
homosexuality, fetishism, sadism, masochism, transvestitism in the works
of many of the greatest writers of the [19]50s, 60s, and 70s (Robert
McKee Irwin).

Patterson-Rudolph. Carol
. On the Trail of Spiderwoman: Petroglytphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest
. Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1997.

Reichard, Gladys A
. Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters
. New York: Macmillan, 1934.